


An Answer

by theprimrosepath



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Episode: c02e088 Unwanted Reunions, Fjord's Backstory (Critical Role), Gen, POV Fjord (Critical Role), Religion, Religious Discussion, Self Confidence, can be interpreted as pre-relationship fjorclay, mentions of uk'otoa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-13 02:28:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28646055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theprimrosepath/pseuds/theprimrosepath
Summary: "Eventually, one day, somebody will pray for a miracle, pray for something to save them to whatever gods are nearby, and that prayer will be answered because you'll show up."(Or: Fjord and Caduceus have a brief conversation after the Chantry.)
Relationships: Caduceus Clay & Fjord, Fjord & Melora the Wildmother (Critical Role)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 23





	An Answer

Fjord maintains his stalwart form until he's closed the door to his room behind him, and then he slumps in a little as that last bit of adrenaline propping up his spine folds to the rawest wave of exhaustion he's felt since the Lotusden Greenwood.

No doubt the others are faring similarly in their respective rooms. He raises a probing, tentative hand to his side—and _ouch_ , there's that stinging wound.

He continues to inspect each aching part of his torso now that they finally have a reprieve from battle (to battle, to metaphorical battle in King Dwendal's throne room). He's careful to avoid resting his back against the door as he does so. It's nice wood, and Fjord's about 80% sure he'd leave a gory imprint of the last couple hours on it if he did.

Almost everything about Rexxentrum, really, has been nothing but wealthy and exceedingly out of his league since they arrived. The rooms of the Camarouth Cottage are no exception. There's a fine bed, large enough for him to spread out starfish-style and comfortable enough that Fjord fears lying down on it at the moment—lest he adhere to it like a barnacle for the next few hours and miss dinner. The other furnishings are equally as well-crafted and maintained.

On one fine side table rests a large porcelain bowl of water. This Fjord makes a break for.

A few minutes later, the water is a dull grayish-pink from a cursory washup. Now that there's no blood or ichor drying on his face, his gory armor and half-skirt shed, he sits on the edge of the bed. Bandages his side wound after healing up a bit with the last of the Wildmother's gifted power.

He sighs and runs a damp hand through his hair. Feels a little overwhelmed.

It wasn't more than a handful of months ago that the goal in mind was to come to Rexxentrum and apply for study at the Soltryce Academy. Fjord was never the most brilliant or attentive in the classroom—far from it, in fact—but he _was_ determined to learn. There was a reason Vandren took a liking to him, and he would surely find the same kind of opportunity at even the most hoity-toity school of magic this side of Wynandir.

Who knew that when he finally arrived at the Empire capital, it would be with an entirely different goal and the strangest assortment of a family he could've come across?

He looks down at the palm of his hand. With a bit of focus, swirling eldritch energy coalesces in the center in a verdant emerald. So different from the sallow yellow-green he woke up on a beach with. Wisps of it spill from the edges of his cupped hand like fog.

Hell's bells, _none_ of this would've made sense to him a week before Sabian's explosion.

Fjord closes his hand into a fist, willing the power away. All of it drifts out as dissipating mist from between his fingers.

It's reassuring to see his own control despite the chaos the last few hours. He didn't like it when Uk'otoa used his power as leverage; he's found that he doesn't like patrons who encourage him to grab for more of it, either. What's leverage is also a carrot on a stick.

In truth, he never loved the ocean for its power—though it absolutely _is_ powerful. It would have killed him had it had its way.

What he loves is the endless horizon. That ever-constant expanse in blues and greens gleaming bright in the sun, or dark and tumultuous with a coming storm. You can leave behind all your concerns out there. Leave them on land, where all the people who care about such things usually remain. Out on the sea, it is nothing but water and whatever lies beyond the horizon.

Almost unbidden, Fjord raises his fist to press against his sternum. Right beneath his shirt, the scar of his own attempt to leverage himself against Uk'otoa still mars his skin. Like the Wildmother felt he needed the reminder despite Caduceus's healing touch.

He thinks She's right. Love should never be about control. In that, Uk'otoa is about as distant from his claim to the sea as Ruidus.

 _You really were there, too, weren't you? In the Chantry._ Is he praying? He doesn't know. _Jokes and excuses aside, you were there to help us stop Obann as well... and free our friend, Yasha._

For the first time, it occurs to Fjord how the Wildmother and the Stormlord are both gods of nature. They are no strangers.

He feels foolish at his prior skepticism of Yasha. Jester called her their friend still, a good person even, while he had simply taken her betrayal at face-value. Well, now he knew better than to judge a person by what they did under the thrall of another.

A knock at his door startles him.

"Fjord?" says the muffled voice of Caduceus. "Is this your room?"

"Yeah, come in," he calls back.

Fjord twists around and winces at the sharp pain telling him how stupid he is for that in time to see Caduceus swing open the door, his tall lanky form close to brushing the top of the door frame.

He immediately looks concerned. "Are you alright?"

"Yeah." Fjord straightens with another wince and then scoots around the edge of the bed until he can better see Caduceus. "It's just my side, I'm an idiot and twisted the whole thing, ha."

"Hold on."

Caduceus closes the door behind him and picks up a chair to carry over and set in front of Fjord. He takes the seat and leans down to better aim his keen gaze at the side Fjord is still holding. He flushes a little at the proximity but lifts his shirt to reveal the bandaged wound. "I already healed it up a little," he mumbles.

"Well, let me heal it up a little bit more."

He brushes his fingertips over the bandages and murmurs a brief prayer while Fjord tries not to twitch. There's a pulse of warmth along his side before the ache there lessens significantly.

"I don't have much left," Caduceus says apologetically as he sits back. "That's all I can do."

The renewed distance is a profound relief; he lets his breathing ease back into normal before he replies, "No, no, it's fine. Any little bit helps, it already feels much better."

An easy smile. "That's good."

God, Fjord feels like an idiot. Again. He lets his shirt fall so he can massage his side through it instead of fidgeting some other awkward, preoccupied way and stares down and away from the other man. Any sort of intimacy is uncomfortable when this is his first family to include physically affectionate people—and people without personal space bubbles a mile wide.

Caduceus's attention is always so _intense_. Piercing his façades like a fishing spear in the shallows.

"How are you feeling?" he asks at the bedcovers.

"Oh, I'm fine. We handled it well."

"You got swallowed by that giant blob Obann turned into."

A mild shrug. "Eh, I'm alright now. What about you? It was quite a lot, what happened in there. The stakes were a lot higher. There were some close calls. A lot of dark power being thrown around."

The image of Yasha driving her greatsword straight down into Beau's unmoving body, her bulky silhouette backlit by the glow of stained glass, isn't something Fjord is going to forget anytime soon, whether she's free now or not. He saw the way Caleb's ash-smeared face went slack with horror, how even Nott in the thrall of Obann's charm flinched at the brutal violence.

_You weren't there. It's familiar and when it must've happened, **you weren't there**._

Fjord rubs the hand he raised against Yasha to leech from her very life. "No kidding. From all of us. I don't think I've ever seen Caleb burn so many people to death in such a short amount of time."

"It haunts him more deeply. I don't envy whatever deeds his past holds."

"No, I don't, either." Fjord inhales, then exhales slowly. "The fight in there was like nothing else we've ever been through before, Caduceus. The entire place felt—charged with something so much bigger than any of us. That beam of sunlight we followed there, then the storm that blew out all the windows when Yasha was freed..."

Caduceus hums. "Like I've mentioned before, I feel a destiny for all of you. There were no shortage of gazes watching us to see if we'd succeed."

"The Stormlord," Fjord says softly. "The Dawnfather. The Wildmother."

"Jester's Traveler friend. And of course, the Chained Oblivion. The Knowing Mistress didn't make herself seen, but I'm sure she was watching as well. She and the Chained Oblivion are strongly opposed."

Six beings of power beyond what Fjord has any comprehension of. All of them, for a brief time, with their attentions fixed on he and his friends. He lets out another long exhale and again wonders how in the Nine Hells he's found himself here—an ordinary sailor but a handful of months ago, now one of the key combatants in a conflict that could have set the stage for a world-ending plot.

Caduceus just sits in his chair looking as calm and unruffled as the day Fjord first met him. Even with bits of dark gore still staining his clothes, long hair lank and smeared with blood in places, a cup of tea with a saucer would look right at home in his hands.

Fjord shakes his head. "I have no clue how you do that."

"Do what?" asks Caduceus, sounding genuinely curious.

"Treat all of this as if... as if it's something normal, I guess." He begins to massage his side again and laughs a little. "I'm not a member of a family whose service to the gods goes back to the Calamity. I grew up in a shitty orphanage and thought I'd be a simple sailor for the rest of my life. The gods were always there of course, but I never really thought about them except when I prayed for things like good weather. _They_ certainly never thought about _me_."

"That's where you've got the wrong idea, Fjord. The gods are always thinking about us."

There's a moment of consideration before Caduceus straightens and reaches into a pocket on his trousers. When he pulls his hand back out, he reveals a palmful of soft pink-gray lichen. "Let's say you're a cultivator of something like lichen. You have to provide an environment that it can not only live in, but thrive in. If you're dedicated, you've probably got multiple different kinds. Each of them has its own needs—they're not interchangeable—and it can be a delicate balance to maintain. So you take care with them. You learn everything all your lichens need. It's a constant process in order to nurture them and keep them healthy.

"It's the same thing with the gods and us. They want us to thrive, so they learn our needs. They're continually taking care of us. They understand that not one of us is interchangeable with another. Maybe they choose to focus on one particular lichen one day, but that doesn't mean they aren't thinking about the entire ecosystem. Far from it, in fact."

Fjord does his best to chew on this metaphor.

It never felt as if the gods paid him any mind until recently. Not when he wished fervently as a child, many times, for loving parents to appear one day—forced to abandon him for some reason or another and only now finally able to whisk him back home. Not when he sat in some out-of-the-way alley every few weeks with a bucket of water, a hand mirror, and a file. Not when he went belowdecks on the Tide's Breath in time to find Sabian lighting the fuse that would sink his entire life to the ocean floor.

He's never been bitter about it the way some other people are. Driftwood Asylum, after all, housed dozens of other orphans like him when he was there. Ships sink every day. That's just how life is.

Caduceus leans in a little. "Do you remember what I told you at Mythburrow?"

"You told me a lot of things."

"Someday, somewhere, someone's going to pray for a miracle. To be saved by whatever god will hear them. And that prayer will be answered because you'll show up." Caduceus is smiling with twinkling, knowing confidence. "What do you suppose the fight at the Chantry was? The gods heard people's prayers for help. Maybe it was Yasha, maybe it was the Cobalt Soul in Zadash, maybe it was the people who would have suffered if the Chained Oblivion escaped. They heard those prayers—and we showed up."

Fjord nods slowly as the other man returns his handful of lichen to his pocket.

He remembers the darkness that swallowed him as he drowned. It was already a stormy day when Sabian lit that fuse to whatever explosives he had prepared; as soon as he landed in the water, he knew he was done for.

Still, he tried to stay afloat, tried to find any nearby debris from the now-flaming ship. But the rough waves soon beat him down.

He thinks he prayed. In between his desperate gasps and choking on the water he tread, he begged. For someone—anyone—to help.

Maybe the first thing that answered his calls as he sank into the depths held malevolent plans for him. But he lived despite an ocean that would have seen him dead, and Fjord knows now that Uk'otoa does not rule the ocean.

"So." Caduceus rests a reassuring hand on his shoulder. "Yes, you're a little new to being in service to the Wildmother. But you didn't end up here, with us in the cathedral, by happenstance. She chose you."

Fjord snorts. "A lot of pressure."

Caduceus shrugs, still smiling, and withdraws his hand.

His mind goes to the image of the _Eldritch blast_ pooled in his hand. The green of a lush forest in summer. Slowly, he says, "She chose me. So I suppose the difference is trust. Trust that She thinks I am... worthy, I guess is the word."

The other man's smile widens.

His gaze is still incredibly intense—but Fjord realizes that part of his discomfort came from a fear that Caduceus would find something inadequate in him, once he looked long enough. Something eases in him, just a little bit.

"Thank you, Caduceus," he says.

"Happy to help. I have something to give you, I think, but..." Caduceus holds out an arm, where his long insect-wing patterned sleeve hangs smeared in places with both blood and black ichor. "I'd like to clean up before any of this stains."

Fjord wrinkles his nose in sympathy and says with a gesture, "I imagine your hair, too..."

"Ugh, yes. After dinner?"

"Of course."

Once the door closes behind Caduceus, Fjord sighs and resists the urge to lean back onto the bed fully. Instead he looks to the side where his leathers and half-skirt still rest on the floor, covered in drying gore themselves. Perhaps he should follow in his friend's footsteps and find a place to refresh the porcelain bowl as well. He'll have time for rest soon enough.

**Author's Note:**

> the world needs more content of fjord being taken seriously.
> 
> find me at [@primrose-path-of-dalliance](https://primrose-path-of-dalliance.tumblr.com) on tumblr, where i post fandom things and the occasional bit of writing.


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